This invention is related to data compression. More particularly, this invention relates to compression of a class of information in which symbols defining an alphabet are communicated by transmittal of a permutation value identifier.
It can be shown that the amount of accumulated knowledge in the world can be compressed into a binary value of on the order of 2.sup.120. However, the compression task is extremely difficult, time-consuming and generally impractical. Information compression is needed for storage and transmission of information.
Conventional compression schemes combine and discard redundant or lower value information. However, lossless compression is desirable to achieve total reconstruction of expanded information contained in a message or unit of information.
An excellent reference book on known compression techniques is Data Compression Book by Nelson. Conventional lossless compression techniques include arithmetic compression, Ziv-Lempel (dictionary-based) compression and Huffman (symbol-entropy-based) compression and run-length encoding. The present invention relates peripherally to dictionary/sorting and run-length encoding compression techniques.